An hour of your life is worth a bit less than a pack of incontinence pads.

Steven Saus injects people with radioactivity as his day job, but only to serve the forces of good. His work has appeared in multiple anthologies and magazines both online and off. He also publishes as Alliteration Ink. You can find him at stevensaus.com and alliterationink.com.

…but if you think about it hard enough, those are fiat currencies as well. If everyone suddenly had a bunch of gold, the price would totally drop – because it wouldn’t be as scarce. (And before the tech industry, it wasn’t particularly useful.) Which means that gold doesn’t have some kind of absolute value either.1

The only thing that makes sense as an absolute is time.1

Which means, quite simply, that our minimum wage is literally saying what the minimum cost of an hour of someone’s life is worth.

And that’s less than the value of a pack of incontinence pads from Wal*Mart.

Remember that.

1 Example: It takes time to extract precious metals (leading to their rarity and “value”); if it was easier to get them due to better extraction techniques or a new supply, then the amount of time needed to collect the same amount would go down, and so would the price.